One might say this space is the place for Casey Gray, judging from the cavernous rock-historied Dogpatch warehouse he calls home.

Since October, when he moved his studio from the San Francisco Art Institute graduate spaces nearby, he's been bunking here, wielding a mean spray can, and making brashly psychedelic paintings equally indebted to his adman granddad and the Grateful Dead, which left its trippy imprint on the onetime Sy Klops studio.

That rock 'n' roll ambiance has made its mark on Gray's canvases. "It's a really weird mash-up of time periods and art styles and technology and whatnot," he says of the space that will probably pass into music history in a few years, replaced by condos. "But this place is a huge influence - just all the weird stuff laying around. It's all part of my life and work."

Pop odes to lost love, saucy vixens, dangerous weaponry, cupcakes and candy, kittens and cougars, beer cans and even the Transamerica Pyramid explode from Gray's work, scattered throughout his studio and ready for transport to his first solo show, "Ill Romantic." His patterned brand of eye candy dares to dip into a kind of ecstatic American dream - or nightmare - of pop, porn and overwhelming consumption, fed by engorged veins of highly loaded imagery.

Inspired by his grandfather, who worked with spray paint as a graphic designer, Gray began stenciling in earnest as a San Jose 12-year-old embellishing the grip tape on his skateboard. "I didn't realize it was a serious art practice till I got into college really," he says. He graduated in May with his MFA in painting at the Art Institute, where instructors such as Dewey Crumpler and Mark Van Proyen gave him the confidence to make his work.

"I don't make paintings like anybody else at school," Gray says matter-of-factly. "Not that I was an outcast, but it was hard for people to even critique it at times because they're not used to seeing spray-paint art, or what could be considered lowbrow, in graduate school."

Considering how intertwined Gray's personal life and his practice are, it's not surprising that he draws from universal images he connects with, or sources close to home - be it a Dolores Park light post that he photographed or a recent spate of heartbreak. "I feel like each painting is about a specific event," he says.

"This one," he adds, gazing at a large-scale parade of bare-breasted seductresses and snack cakes, "I think I'm going to call 'It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To.' "